Center For Gifted Education (SEP): July 11
On July 11, excited 4th-6th graders came to our lab here at W&M to get a taste of a professional lab atmosphere and try their hands at our techniques! The kids got to extract banana DNA and build their candy DNA models, and also had the opportunity to run gel electrophoresis on the food coloring of their choice. The kids loaded the gels themselves, and tried every color of the rainbow! We all loved seeing the orange, green, and purple split into the primary colors (plus some pink). The students were so quick to pick up on how the differences in molecular sizes accounted for how far the dyes ran on the gel. It turned out blue was the heaviest, right around the same size as pink, and the yellow was the lightest-- it ran the furthest on our gels. Finally, we also taught the kids a little about transcriptional noise and the imaging system we will be using to analyze how noisy the promoters we are characterizing are. We showed them some slides on our confocal microscope, and the children watched as the RFP-expressing bacteria wriggled on the screen.